Grammarly CEO Rahul Roy-Chowdhury on the future of user-centric language tools | E1817

35:43We use it inside Grammarly. What does enterprise cost? What does enterprise cost? Tell me the truth. Because nobody ever puts that on their website. Is it on your website? Yeah. Go to the website. You can take a look. There's different ways to... I'm not trying to be cagey here. There's different flavors of it. 20-person organization if I want enterprise. There's a Teams feature that you can try. There's a free trial. So just do the free trial. I'll do it. Yeah. If you like it, give me a team back. But if I pay 10, 15 bucks a month per person, what do I wind up paying net-net? So if I'm paying 15 bucks a person paying what is 180 a year, I have 20 people.

36:12So right now I pay you like four grand a year for Grammarly, which I feel is a pretty good deal, right? I feel like that's a good deal for both of us. If I go to enterprise, what do I add a zero or does it double it? Where would I be? It doesn't double it. It's a slight step up. And it depends on kind of enterprise versus teams. But it's very reasonably priced and you get a lot of extra value because Why don't people just put that on the website, like the exact cost and everything? Because I noticed this with all these, every time I want to go to the enterprise level, people don't put it. Is that because they want to get a salesperson on the phone?

36:41Well, we have two ways to get Grammarly. There's a direct self-serve. That's all on the website. You can just click. There's a plans page. You can go to Grammarly.com slash plans. You see all the prices. And then there's an enterprise sales driven. You could call it a managed go-to-market. it and that usually isn't on the website because you kind of want to understand how wide is how big is the deployment what's it going to take to actually make that company successful so there's more nuance that goes into it it's not it's less about not being transparent and more about it's more bespoke and so we just need to understand what i always wind up doing and everybody in my portfolio 400 companies i've invested in as i said in my little document here if they all just go figure out what is salesforce cost for enterprise and then there's like all these websites now that actually like if you go to what is it g2 captara and some of these places they'll just in the comments they'll tell you what people do everybody knows technology is moving at a blistering pace but code academy's goal is to help you stay a step ahead so whether you have some experience or you're brand new to coding code academy offers everything you need to build the tech career you want gain specialized skills in artificial intelligence full stack engineering data science cybersecurity, and more.

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38:35So start your free trial today. Visit codecademy.com slash twist to try codecademy pro free for 14 days. That's C-O-D-E-C-A-D-E-M-Y.com slash twist. Coachatomy.com slash twist. Can I tell you my single favorite feature of Grammarly? It's not any of the features you showed. It's actually a Grammarly business feature. Okay. Which is, it's a thing called knowledge share. So the idea is, there's so much jargon. Like inside Grammarly, we have project names and acronyms and new people are joining and they're like, what is this thing? Like there's someone who just mentioned this word, whatever it is.

39:14It's like a glossary. So, you know, it exists somewhere. Like maybe there's a wiki page, but I'm reading an email and I'm like, should I stop reading the email, go to the wiki page? I probably should, but I don't because I'm lazy. Yeah. And so. Or you're just in flow. You're just going through your email box. You don't want to get out of your email box. Let's put the positive PS. Exactly. That's the reason. And so with knowledge share, we actually show you what these things are in the flow of your reading and writing. So you can see, what is this thing? I can learn more about it. I can find out who the people are that I can go talk to about it.

39:49And so it's trying to get all of your organizational context built into your writing workflows. And that's a very good idea. The glossary is killer. I know I'm simplifying with glossary, but that's a great idea. And then also people might not know how to capitalize a product name. So you got, you know, some sales folks are just using like a space and, you know, the product name is, you know, Grammarly Go, but we like to capitalize the geo, you know, like, and it's one word, not two, right? So that's what would be in your glossary. And a couple other features here people should know about. When you look at goals, this is where, you know, I really talked to my team about just trying different things.

40:29You know, here it's, it's set at general. but my intent here you know it's really to inform people but i also want to convince them so i'm going to pick both of those and then this is general i'm going to say now general is a pretty good place to start that's the default but you might want to go business and and if you go business um you know it applies more rules right um that and take out some informal expressions yeah that's right just some more professional more polished etc yeah yeah but now I don't like that because I like to be casual and casual this is going to let you have a little more stylistic flexibility you know spread your wings a little bit now of course you can still write whatever you want it's just this is what gives you the suggestions right so this will change how suggestions come into the suggestions correct yes now another great one here how much knowledge does your audience have right this is the empathy for the audience and you know if you have a lot of acronyms and stuff in you know you're talking about the sec or you're talking about you know some obscure topics you say expert um and uh yeah you can um assume a more higher level and then formality neutral is the thing and then so did did i did i explain those correctly you did you did a great job jason i i was going to ask can you are you available to do product this is amazing if you need a pm i'm here yeah okay good to know so those are goals and you know when you're typing uh one of the things i love is on the right hand side kind of gives you a little scorecard in real time and now i already fixed everything in here but if i went in and i just put in a couple of typos and i'll put in three typos for fun you know and it checks everything you know it's going to change some of the correctness and stuff like that and you're going to change your scores but it does give you clarity engagement delivery so you know you can really start to see how you're doing.

42:24And the new feature, you know, so if I click on correctness here, it's gonna just focus on that. But the new thing that you've done is it is a perfect example startups or start dash ups. Yep. Yep. Is grammarly go. Now, this is a very experimental feature. This is your AI feature. And so do you use which language model are using here? we're using right now we're using gpt 3.5 turbo running on azure that's what we're doing right now yeah so here um it's giving you prompts so most people don't know how to do prompt engineering but it can say hey identify any gaps yeah give me ideas to improve uh pick out my main point and this is just a great way to do it providing startup investment advice like it nailed that right like it really does a great job um of figuring out what's in here but you also uh can give people ideas which i think is uh you know give me ideas for improvement that's a really interesting one it's probably going to tell me to add more points uh consider breaking up the text into smaller paragraphs sure try to provide more concrete examples that's a great one uh and consider providing more context around what year zero means for startups this may be unfamiliar terminology.

43:40That's a great one, because I just made up your zero in this context. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can see already here, that this grammarly go you call it, but let's just call it your AI. Yeah, it's our generative AI offering to kind of build it on this life cycle is I think what they Yeah, I think co pilot that's what I think I think it's taken. Oh, it's co pilot. Oh, is that trademark? Maybe it's not. But yeah, I think everybody's calling them co-pilots in the industry but you're right get get let get for us it's actually not a different thing it's actually this is what grammarly is it's now solving your entire life cycle it's not a different it's not a different product it's actually part of our offering yeah and then you had this crazy feature uh and i remember this in the early days wow you really have found every single feature we have yes this is a little known feature little known feature you might deprecate at some point i bet but um because i think like it yeah i i'm really interested about this one because there are human editors out there uh and they work from home and they will read something you're doing and um you can have you'll actually have a marketplace of humans to to do this so how and so you can see here it says hey in 24 hours we'll edit this document for four bucks in 12 hours for six bucks and three hours for 12 bucks so it's time-based pricing a little uber surge pricing in here if you want to go faster if you don't care how many what percentage of people actually use this feature because i saw this i was like i don't think anybody uses this but people do use it i mean enough for us to have a pretty strong team of people who are engaged helping users etc so it's not a huge feature it's definitely a power user feature so it's a small percentage but for the people who do really need it it's invaluable so we want to keep it around just for that and it's actually a human gets an alert it's actually a human looking at your text and giving you suggestions on how to make it better just like maybe you have part of the thousand people you have on staff or are these freelancers these are uh they're some of them are on stuff and so it's a mix of uh yeah some to some on stuff and some uh working with us is the reason to offer this since it's like a very you know small percentage overall people using it and to put effort into this is it because this is a way to see what ai and machine learning aren't doing and this is like your reinforcement learning part of the product?

46:04There's a couple of reasons. One is we just have a lot of language expertise in-house. That's actually one of the things that sets us apart is we have a ton of linguists on staff. We are always understanding and evolving the structure of language. And so this is a way for us, A, to provide a great service to our users for the people who care about it. But also, as we're dealing with these really complex, you saw some of these early suggestions on clarity and brevity. Now, the training models that go into that require really deep annotation. The training data that we're using and the annotations we use for that machine learning model is not something you can just kind of give to an untrained person to do.

46:46And so we have our expertise and our linguistic expertise is actually something that enables us to do better training data, better quality input to get better model output. and so that's kind of a part of what we invest in in our solutions this is my uh and the defaults like really matter you can set all your defaults yeah so you know if you want to use you know uh apa whatever oxford commas but i noticed this feature this must have been a little controversial internally you added the woke features you added the like uh let's call it language police for me as a writer and a free speech advocate uh um but for corporate super important because people will you know uh you might have some old people in your organization who use words and pronouns and you know call uh women girls or guys boys and do silly stuff like that but it has sound more diplomatic i turn that right off i'm not diplomatic i like the dictator kind of stuff use gender neutral pronouns avoid uh personal pronouns and academic writing and then there's a long tail ableist language uh bias language uh family gender human rights uh lgbtqia uh race ethnicity politically incorrect language tell me about putting all those features in because i got to think that might have been controversial in some way and then how do you default them Are you defaulting them on for people or off for people?

48:20So the way I think about this is we all communicate differently. We have different styles, different approaches. You have one way, I have a different way. That's what makes communication so difficult, ironically, which is why Grammarly exists. And so what we want to do is give people the tools. We're not here to be prescriptive about how language should be. I don't think that's our job. That's not our role. But you want to make sure that you understand how you're communicating and you're doing it intentionally versus saying, I did this thing. It seemed to have landed like a brick. And I'm not quite sure why.

48:57How come people didn't resonate with what I said or people got upset or whatever? We can help you with that. So we want to make sure you understand the implications of what you're doing. And then you make the choices. As a user, you should decide ultimately how you want to sound. How do you default them? This reflects you and your voice. Actually, I do not know how we default them. Yeah, I was just curious about that. Like, it really is interesting. These things are always changing as well. So this is, I think it's very important in a corporate. Yeah, we keep up to date with the changes too. So it's not like done and dusted.

49:31So this is where our linguistic experts are always tracking, like what is the new thing that happens? So, for example, to take an example from a few years ago, when COVID started spreading, there were lots of disparaging terms being used to refer to COVID. That was a new thing that didn't exist prior to COVID. And so, we were on it. And we were like, look, you may choose to use those terms, but be aware that they are considered disparaging. And so, you can make an informed choice. And that's our job is to inform, but not to police or dictate. Yeah. I mean, the perfect example is homeless. people there's a term now people suffering from people experiencing homelessness is i guess the i guess somewhat comical way to say homeless uh some people would say uh and then handicapped um this is something i learned recently that uh that could be ableist uh to use the word handicapped and so there are some uh words around that so i was just seeing if handicapped actually raised a flag i mean i think it's a good thing because you don't want to hurt anybody's feelings and then i think you're gonna this is where i think enterprise comes in right like you got to really think as an organization if people use that i i had yeah somebody in an organization who kept using the r word uh which is retarded and they were using it um not to say something has changed um in a in a way that's kind of broken or something uh like to refer to a piece of plastic that got belt melted and and yeah whatever uh they were using it as the as a synonym for stupid you know and i had to tell them like you can't say that anymore you know that is like i mean 20 years old but this is where i think like for enterprise yeah you could lose a deal if somebody said like this is a retarded proposal and you know they actually should be saying this is a this proposal could be you know improved or we're being stupid in how we're creating this proposal my view of this is very simple which is that it really comes down to outcomes you're communicating with someone or a group of people you want to communicate as effectively as possible that's a goal and our goal is to help you do that that's what that's our product's objective and so the question is if you're using language that may or may not resonate with people you turn different settings in different ways.

51:55Is that helping you achieve that goal or not? And do the thing that helps you achieve the goal. And we're going to try and help you do that. And, you know, so if someone wants to kind of make a point because they feel like that's kind of their personal brand, but it doesn't help them achieve their goal, that's fine. But I see our job as a piece of software, not as kind of legislators in this country is, let's just help you achieve your goals and we're going to give you everything you need to make sure you can do that. Raul, you passed it perfectly. I gave you the hardest. Even inside of Grammarly, there is a micro controversial question I could ask you and you answered it deftly.

52:37Avoiding unnecessary ellipses. This is one that I have a big fight with Grammarly about and now I see it's on the settings page. I didn't know this was on the setting pages, but I like ellipses. I think many of these settings are born of people having their own fights with different things yeah i have my own like oxford commas yes i don't like oxford commas no but every once in a while but the problem is i turned it off but the problem is every once in a while you really do need it and so i'm like ah what do i do you know this is the this is the beauty and the infuriating piece of just language you know i mean this is this is language you know sometimes it's basically a jump ball you know it's like it's a it's a stylistic decision you might want to use it sometimes you might not want to use it one thing i love is word variety this is something i've always as an editor because i used to be a magazine editor yeah i'd have people use the same word over and over again i'd say you know you've used this word beautiful four times in the last 400 words like you love beautiful like yeah got it like let's move on can we use a different word than beautiful and for people who don't know one of the great features which sometimes doesn't work when I'm going around the web.

53:44Yeah. I find that there's a little bit of stickiness and some UI work to be done on the double click on a word. So here I'm clicking on prototype or incorporated here. So, you know, when you double click, it will give you word suggestions, basically the source, et cetera. And you can see included, contained, mixed, integrated, assimilated, embodied. This is really a powerful feature for folks. It can get them in trouble because it can get too wordy, but grammarly will also tell you if you're getting too wordy and flowery with the language as well but i find this doesn't follow me around the web so maybe you could talk a little bit about the chrome extension versus the one that's in your system tray and then the conflict between those two and like web forms are also problematic they seem to get sticky sometimes um what what should people be using should they be using a chrome extension or the or the desktop tray item now i think people should be using the desktop icon uh the desktop app the native applications because that is the most complete coverage and then the chrome extension could be used for places that you need extra help or the desktop app doesn't cover uh such as google docs is one is one such example what is going on with you guys in google docs superhuman like it seems like a little bit of a war are they is there like some sort of like security thing where they think you're injecting stuff in or are they trying to block you because you're a threat?

55:06No, it's not. None of those things. Google Docs, for example, the issue is the way that Grammarly works is we look at the page, the HTML on the page to understand what the content is, and then we provide our suggestions based on like, okay, you've typed in this bunch of stuff in a text box. We understand what you're doing and here's our set of suggestions. That's our extension. Now, Google Docs moved away from that model to something called Canvas, which you can think of it as they're drawing the text. What you're seeing is not text as an HTML thing. It's like you're drawing the lines and the squiggles that result in characters on the page.

55:45So for extensions... Why are they doing that? There's performance. There's good reasons to do it. There's performance reasons, etc. So that's the reason it's complicated. And that's why we have the extension as well, because there's lots of different technologies. And so ultimately, we want to make sure we understand what users have written so we can give them the right suggestions. And, you know, when Google Docs makes a technical change, and by the way, they love us and we love them. And they worked with us on this transformation. So this is not something that happened overnight. We worked with the Google team.

56:14They said, look, we're going to move to Canvas. Let's help you figure out how to do the navigation so that you don't get affected. And so, you know, we work really well together. Here's another suggestion for you. Yes. I want to be able to go to the New York Times, but I'm reading a story. I know this sounds a little crazy. Okay. When I'm reading a page, like I'm reading my own web page. Yeah. I want to be able to highlight a portion of that page or have Grammarly, you know, like as a browser button, not with the extension, but just, you know, somewhere floating around. And then just right mouse click and say Grammarly this page.

56:46So I could actually run Grammarly against the New York Times I'm reading or against a web page or a press release and see it in the wild. Has anybody else asked for that or am I a lunatic? Fascinating. It's a great idea. I mean, this goes back to this AI is going to now allow us to go from revision, which has been our bread and butter for a long time, to this entire life cycle, including comprehension. I'm reading something, summarize it, make it easier. So maybe we can talk about AI because I think that's something you even bring up. I notice every single person, that little Grammarly Go you're doing, that's in everything now.

57:23Google Docs just added it. Notion has it. Coda has it. It's just everywhere. and people are selling third-party tools yes yes so what is your plan in terms of dealing with let's say the coda notions in google docs of the world who are looking at the success of and saying hey i want some of that yeah so a couple of couple of things first codas and google docs and notions of the world they're not competitors they're we're friends because we are trying to we're not trying to take their surface we're trying to take what is being written in these places and make it better. Yeah, but they're trying to take your surface.

57:56So let's talk about AI and how I think about AI. Okay, so step one is recognize that we as knowledge workers are spending over a half hour work week in written communication. We're drowning in information overload. We're just like across messages, documents, email, social media, news. Oh, my God, just so much information, so much to process. How do I stay on top of it? I don't know about you, but for me, it's a struggle. I've got to really work to kind of stay on top of it. So let's spark that. You all know that to be true. On the other side of the equation, we're like, all right, Gen AI, best thing since sliced bread, amazing.

58:36It's going to change the world, which is true, by the way. I do believe that. Yeah, of course. We agree.

58:43But while there's a lot of uncertainty around how Gen AI will play out, one thing is clear, that the cost of content, the cost of content creation is going to drop to zero or very close to zero because of Gen AI. All right. So on the one hand, we're drowning in content. Isn't it not enough hours in the day to consume all this content? On the other hand, we're super excited about a new capability that lets us create 10x or 100x amount of content. It doesn't add up. Who's going to read all this stuff? Not me. Maybe you will, but I don't have the time to do it. So to me, that's a sign that while generative AI is awesome, it is very early in its deployment lifecycle.

59:27And so step one in the hype cycle is let's just take AI into everything and we just create a bunch more content. But I don't believe that's the right end state of deployment of this tech because, as we discussed, the answer is not like, now read 100 times the stuff you're reading today. That can't be the answer. It's physically impossible. That's why Grammarly comes in because I think what we uniquely can do is we recognize the insight we have is it's not about more content. It's about better. We can see across all of the apps you're writing. We can help you connect the dots across all these different workflows.

1:00:04We understand you. We understand your context, so we can help you communicate in a way that sounds authentic to you that uses the right context to make it more relevant. And then we can bring all of that to bear to help you achieve your goals faster and more effectively and more efficiently than before. So I believe this idea of stitching across all of these workflows, that's our future. That's what we want to enable. That's what we're doing. So if I am bouncing between Twitter, Zendesk, doing my customer support tickets, um i'm using uh you know linkedin and i'm posting updates and blog posts there i'm using twitter i'm using slack obviously i'm using notion coda whatever my sales team's using some other tools uh and we keep talking about i don't know some project we're working on and how we communicate let's say in your case um grammarly enterprise and so in your enterprise you're talking about grammarly enterprise you might the way you explained it to me um have explained it like 100 times this month to people yes now it knows how you explain it as the ceo and then there's a product manager explaining it and then you got the sales team explaining it yes and it could be like hey these are this is actually the best explanation and let's standardize on this one yes exactly i mean so much of what i do is mentally or physically just cutting and pasting context from one place to another.

1:01:29And that's not great. I mean, why? And that's not going to, you know, even if you think about what makes a good enterprise, right, even the words we use, we describe a well functioning company as it's a well oiled machine. Yep. It's a very industrial age metaphor, right? And so we don't need well oiled machines, we need AI enabled enterprises. And so it's not about, let's just think it's a pretty good vision. It's about better. And so that's my vision. yeah i think the vision of um consolidating my writing across all platforms which means you're going to have to ask me for the right to just intercept everything i type or i'm going to have to say put notion coda google docs my email uh and my sales tools and my customer support tools put that into this but don't do my signal i message don't do my passwords don't do last pass or one password and so are you going to have to like kind of get permissions for me as to what to put into the knowledge base and then on an enterprise basis or is this going to roll up into my enterprise as well this is going to roll up into the enterprise and so you know users will have choice they everyone kind of decides how they want to opt in and data permissions etc But he touched upon something really interesting, which is user trust is going to be critical to the effective deployment of AI.

1:02:50So this is something I personally care deeply about. This is something Grammarly cares deeply about. And so I think that is going to be the thing that ultimately would enable the success of this technology broadly. Because at the end of the day, let's say some large enterprise says, all right, I want to use generative AI. I want to transform my business. I want to move from well-oiled machine to AI-enabled enterprise. Guess what? It's not going to happen overnight. It's going to take years to drive that transformation. And so I want to be the person to go to these enterprises to say, we are your trusted partner on this journey.

1:03:25We don't know where the end state is. No one knows. If anyone says, I know exactly how it's going to end, I don't believe you. It's going to be a journey. And so we are your trusted partner on this journey. We've made deep investments in responsible AI, in privacy, in security. and this is something we know how to do and i think it's essential like it's actually essential yeah i think you have the right approach there i think we have to also have a reset on employees especially remote employees and people and their what's their work laptop and what's their private life and i told my team where because we're increasingly recording calls transcribing calls and summarizing calls um and sales teams are doing this with different sales coaching software you've probably seen that yep so i think everybody in business needs to understand your work laptop everything you do on it is going to be recorded eventually um and in some cases some jobs it already is so if you're in finance you know this already because you have compliance um and google probably records everything happening on people laptops and a bunch of those large enterprises do that in a lot of different job functions um and so don't do anything casual on your work laptop and i think you're going to have to have your personal laptop next to you so if you're multitasking during the day which we all do and you're like you know what i i gotta buy something for my kids let me just hop over to amazon you're gonna just have to get into the mode of i'm gonna use the second laptop or i'm gonna use my personal phone for that because everything you're doing because of ai is gonna to be recorded and put into the repository in the database and i was talking to a sales team or talking about sales teams now whoever the best salesperson is their calls are getting recorded um and then put into the sales training software and then you know ai is like examining it whoever the best salesperson was and they know how to get through objections oh you got somebody selling grammarly enterprise and they talk to me and they're like hey yeah it's going to be you know an extra two grand a year or whatever um but you know hey obviously you know if we pick up one mistake and uh we make everybody 10 better pays for itself many times over and we think we can make everybody 5 faster yeah even 20 people 5 faster you're going to recapture that and pays for itself in month one and if that like works that immediately is going to be trickled down to every other sales executive as the greatest way to overcome the increased cost you know uh of you know going to enterprise mode and some size software what are your thoughts on this like the the the way i think a lot of us workers knowledge workers are going to have to start thinking about whatever we do on our laptops is captured and processed and then this change in trust that we're just sort of talking on because people are not talking about this right now well i think yeah i think there's a couple of things going on one is i want to make sure like you know there's this thing that people say that ai is not going to displace people people using ai will displace people not using ai i think that actually yeah explain i think that's true because yeah i believe that you know technology always ends up becoming an instrument for people to do bigger and better things there's always been fear in tech all the way back from the 70s when atms first started getting introduced into the u.s tellers went on strike because they're like oh my god death of the teller uh profession in the u.s none of that happened tellers actually ended up doing more complex yeah uh more interesting jobs yeah and actually the number of bank branches skyrocketed because it was cheaper to open a bank branch with ATMs.

1:07:02So actually, it had the opposite impact than people thought. And tech always surprises on the upside. I'm a tech optimist, and I believe that we should just use tech and harness it to make ourselves better. The thing I have in my soapbox, I don't know if you've seen one of the talks I did, was I wish AI was called augmented intelligence. It's actually so much better. like that artificial intelligence is like it's scary like you know robots killer robots and art in consciousness we want these tools to make us better to augment our skills that's what this is all about and so i really think of this as augmented intelligence and so we should build our products to really enable that to be true and people should see that so as knowledge workers to go to your question i would like knowledge workers not to be feel not to feel like this is something being done to them that this is like they're kind of pawns in this great game and they're powerless.

1:07:54This is about augmenting your skills and your potential. And we as software providers, it's our responsibility to make that true. We can say it, but you got to make it true. So that's a core kind of product development tenet we have at Grammarly to make sure that we don't lose sight of the fact that this is about augmenting people. Yeah. And that's, I'm sure, happening. What do you think about the privacy issues and then all this data being sucked up and then processed against an entire organization versus you know i have my own little island i sit on my laptop my writing my way of doing business and then this sort of collective intelligence my hive mind because now you know you used to have these little fiefdoms inside companies you worked at google you might have seen a couple of them you know little islands of data and best practices for them yeah android people want to do something some way the chrome team wants to do something another way and never the two shall meet or until Sundar comes down and says the two shall meet.

1:08:53So maybe you talk a little bit about that change that's occurring and or even if you I don't know if you've thought about it that much. Yeah, you know, I mean, I think privacy is an ongoing issue. And so there's, there's lots of interesting, like, privacy and user trust can be a bit of a fuzzy concept. It's like a lot of willingness around it. There's this thing called the trust equation, which if you haven't seen, you should take a look at it. It's given me a lot of…it brings rigor to the concept of trust. This is created by some Harvard Business School professors, I think, a couple of decades ago.

1:09:26In a nutshell, trust equals credibility plus reliability plus intimacy divided by self-interest. Credibility is… Am I capable of doing a good job? I tell you that I'm going to keep your data safe, But if I'm not very good at security, I'm not credible. So credibility is you got to have the capability to do a good job. Reliability is what is the promise you're making to your users? And how reliably are you following through and adhering to those promises? You can think of these almost as brand attributes. Exactly. That's the one. Yeah. So trustworthiness equals your credibility plus your reliability plus your intimacy divided by your self-orientation.

1:10:11Correct. Got it. So reliability is, for example, we don't sell user data. We don't do ads. And so that's a core brand promise we make. We're never going to go back on it. We structure the company around making sure that that's never called into question. So that's reliability. Intimacy is about how do you feel? Do you feel like you're in control or do you feel like it's being done to you, something is being done to you? And so that actually requires very deliberate product decisions. Do you just apply a bunch of stuff and tell people that it's done? Or do you have people in the loop so they can actually look at what's going on, make changes, and have agency in the process?

1:10:49I really believe that people should have agency, and so that goes in intimacy. And then self-orientation erodes trust. That's why it's divided by self-orientation because that's a question of to what extent are your incentives and my incentives aligned? am I a pawn in your game am I the product you know all these different things people talk about and so Grammarly for example as just one example of using this is our incentives and our users incentives are 100 % aligned because we make money when people pay for our service that's it that's our only source of income and you lose money if they leave and you lose money if they leave so that's the unsubscribe is such truth in product exactly so that's where I feel like that's where the rubble meets the road is if I look at some product idea or some business idea that causes us to create any sort of daylight between our incentives and our users' incentives, that's a no.

1:11:48Yeah, I mean, you can do Facebook, right? Like you put Facebook into here, people don't feel it's very trustworthy. Exactly. So you have credibility. It's like, they say like, we're not sharing your data all the time and reliability. I think they reliably sell your data and then people feel like the ads are creepy and like too and then intimacy like suckerberg doesn't talk to the user base right and it's like he's never really talks about how they're using your data or protecting you and then when you go try to change your settings uh on your page you're like these settings are made to confuse me as opposed to the grammarly setting page uh where you're like oh this is to enable me the setting pages yes are dark patterns is the term right uh for settings that are like designed to steer you in a certain direction that you don't want to go yeah that's right to unsubscribe yeah exactly it's like i'm giving you this option but i don't really want you to do it that's like you're gonna you're gonna lose right there that's that's a trust losing uh kind of situation i was literally trying to unsubscribe from a newsletter i was paying for on substack and the number of dark patterns like just for the substack team like really i mean so lame i had to click like five times to unsubscribe yeah and they're like you can unsubscribe and it's like from the free newsletters and then it's like no i want to unsubscribe from the paid one obviously and it's like oh that's on a different page and i'm like okay i click that page and then it's like okay this is the page to unsubscribe and then there's a second unsubscribe button i'm like really and like the wall street journal and substack spent all this time trying to build up their credibility to their platforms and then in the final instance i don't trust either of them because how you make me suffer and i went off on uh peloton for this you can't pause your peloton in the app or your tonal you have to call them on the phone and i'm like i can sign up and give you my credit card in the app just i'll take your money yeah but also like pausing like okay i'm away for the summer i'm not going to use my tonal and my peloton for three months it's 50 each a month or something so it's like 300 no yeah just let me pause it for the summer when i'm in tahoe i want to pause it I'm not going to use it.

1:13:57Yeah. And they're like, no, you have to call us on the phone. And then Tonal didn't even let me. They're like, you have to cancel it. I'm like, I don't want to cancel it. I want to use it on September 5th. And no. And so this is super important, the trust equation. Self-orientation, I'm having a hard time understanding that. So self-orientation is exactly like, what is your incentive and what is the user's incentive? So let's look at ads company. I'm trying to get the user to use my product because I'm trying to sell ads and I'm making my money through ads. Now, you may be well-motivated, but your self-orientation is different.

1:14:34It's diverging from your users. And so, it's manageable, but it erodes trust. You've got to be clear that it erodes trust and you've got to be very good at everything else because this is a net negative. In our case at Grammarly, we're like, we don't want anything to ever get in the way of having 100 % alignment between our incentives and our users' incentives. None of this question around, am I the product or why do you have this dark pattern? I need to put this feature in place, but I don't really want you to use it because that's not good for our business. None of that stuff. So it's actually very simplifying.

1:15:09Sometimes you've got to say no to things, but it creates some simplicity and clarity for the path ahead. All right, listen. I can't believe we talked about all the features in Grammarly for over an hour. You did a great job, Jason. You're a great folks person. When you do your user conference, I'll come up and talk about your new features. I will take you up on that. No, it's absolutely great. I can't wait for this vision you have of the AI that is, you know, taking all of my writing and then just organizing it for me in one place and giving me suggestions. I love the idea of the snippets. So we're investors in a company called Superhuman, another role who is obsessed with product.

1:15:48And he's got these snippets in it. So, you know, as an example, a lot of people pitch us to be on the podcast and we don't take pitches. and i get 20 a day and then some people will ask they'll reply 10 times to them and so i ignore the first one but then when the second third fourth one comes in i just hit and it's from like a big pr firm i hit reply yeah and then i hit semicolon s and it puts in thank you so much for thinking about us we actually don't take pitches for the podcast if you could note in your database and remove us uh from your database that would be really appreciated best jacal and you know people take it well they understand yeah this is not it saves you so much time yeah yeah and but i have that in one place i would like my producers to have that i would like to be able to share that with my team so i've been asking raul like hey can we have multiplayer mode in our organization to share that but you know like text is happening all over my desktop if you did it and you said hey here's something that you say all the time yeah do you want to make it into a snippet do you want to make it into a reoccurring you know like we have by the way we have that and so you really You need to check out, you need, we also have snippets.

1:16:54Oh, you do have snippets. So you can do exactly what you're saying and you can have shared with your entire team. So it sounds like you got to go check out Grammarly Business. I'm going to Grammarly Business. I just had everybody buy it for individuals. So we're going, we're going to go up to business. We can help you. Yeah, we can help you. I'm going to do it right after this call. Awesome. No, I'm going to pay for it. I don't need any freebies. Yeah. I like to pay for it. Please do pay for it. Yes. Yeah, no, this is, you know, even when we have like, when I invest in companies or I have advertisers or like, oh, we'll send you something.

1:17:20I'm like, let me just pay for it so that I talk about trust. Yeah, I asked my kid to pay for it. He's like, dad, I'm going to use Grammarly. I'm like, please pay full price. It's valuable. You got to pay for it. Yeah. All right. Listen, I appreciate you. And everybody go try a Grammarly. You'll love it. Just use a free version. Use it for a day and then upgrade to the paid version. I guarantee you, you will love it. And we'll see you all next time on this week in startups. Bye-bye. Thank you.